No, I'm dead serious. DIablo II sucked greatly compared to Diablo I. Blizzard tends to ruin the magic of the original with their sequels. Warcraft III was a cool game, but not in the line of Warcraft games. Maybe as a standalone fantasy bs game it'd be somewhat cool. Same for SC2. It's the complete opposite of the original. It's uncool, unstylish, highly cliche, predictable and badly executed.

One note to the "Blizzard tends to ruin the magic of the original with their sequels." thing:The comparison with Diablo I and II may be correct. It was mainly Blizzard North, who worked on the first two games.

But for the WarCraft and in that case StarCraft series are in my opinion several reasons why the sequels feel somewhat different than the predecessors. The immense amount of years between the games and a nearly complete different staff. Blizzard has waited far too long: The people who worked on StarCraft II are by far not ALL the same who worked on the original StarCraft. So it was to be expected that StarCraft II will feel different in many areas. (Same goes for WC II -- III, in one way or another...)

Back in the day when Blizzard created the original StarCraft, they were way more focused on the product they worked on, because it was their only main project. But as for StarCraft II, there is in the next room a big machine called World of WarCraft AND a growing monster named Diablo III. Blizzard is now MUCH bigger and a complete another company as twelve years ago.

Diablo 2 eliminated the dark atmosphere of Diablo 1. Sure the gameplay was better, the story was more fleshed out, but the atmosphere was a downer to me originally. Act 1 was the most "horrific" act they had thanks to the Rogue Monastery resembling Diablo 1's catacombs. Diablo 3 also looks much more vivid and colorful than Diablo 2, while again I'm sure the story may be good, the gameplay so far for me has been smooth sailing, but the atmosphere is just.. Not Diablo to me. Every rendition we've seen of users using simple filters to darken the atmosphere have been right. Considering the fact it's all texture based, I wouldn't be surprised to see a mod doing just that.

WarCraft was their first transition from 2D to 3D, it was alright, but nothing revolutionary to be honest. The graphics weren't top notch for the time, 3D has never really sat well with Blizzard since they focus heavily on mass market, thus their low poly really IS low poly.

StarCraft II is overbeaten to me, personally, I don't think it's terrible, but I do think it could of been much more beautiful in terms of graphics. The story is a different thing though, since this is the second game where they try to cater to a much larger audience, and they just lost sight of who they were.

You know after the series of grim dark games it's kind of nice to see one actually use some colors rather than wrecking everything with post processing into shades of brown. I've never really understood the difference in atmosphere after having played both D1 and D2, other than looking like every other game from that time from the crushed colour palette.

Of course nobody is ever willing to elaborate on this, arrows flying out of nowhere wasn't exactly a great atmosphere to me along with bright yellow zombies. I don't think half the idiots calling D3 cartoony actually knows what such a thing looks like, most of the time its Blizzard not using larger textures where they should be leaving everything washed out.

All SC2 managed to do was look like every other game using deferred rendering from 4-5 years ago. Actually having some knowledge about modelling and animations/rigging almost everything in that game makes me cringe how bad it is. It's really funny that SC1 has a higher production quality overall than SC2 does considering how long they've been hiding it in development.

D3 is pretty cartoony, though. It isn't really the color palette, I guess people just like to blame the easiest thing the most. The ridiculously out of proportion models, ugly texturing overall, and horrible animating really contribute to it. I struggle to identify if Diablo 3 even has normal mapping or not.

Know a game that is "cartoony"? Bulletstorm.

Lifted from my lovely LP, may have JPEG distortion and x264 compression. But they aren't photoshopped promotion pics!

Yeah. It has a nice color palette and still doesn't look retarded! I like to call this neat trick "art style". What Blizzard has is not an "art style". It's what us Canadians call "Laziness". D3 exhibits laziness like an oozing, festering fly larva embedded in the side of your face. D3 looks like a carbon copy of Mythos so far.

There's a big difference between cartoony and "style". Cartoony is a lazy way to dodge putting effort into your graphics. Sc2 is not entirely cartoony, but it is quite lazy! Just look at the bottom of organic cliffs and half the rock doodads. What you're seeing is some of the most simple UV maps in modeling existence being mangled by interns. God forbid you look at the Viking... Style is what games like Bulletstorm have. An extravagant color palette that doesn't look like a pile of confusing lard. Then you have Cellshading, which flat out doesn't work in 3d games, but that's another bag of dicks.

The thing about Diablo is it wasn't built on just the color palette. It was built on the environments and the detailing. Now I can't comment about D3 in this regard until I actually play it, but I think most people get nostalgic about the Butcher and his happy hole the most. To reflect this, there is the Harem and other massively mangled places in D2 as well, including the lovely Laconius killing room Durance of Hate. Mangled corpses everywhere, often full nude, rivers of blood, ect. D3 lacks all of this so far. This is something you can't pull off well in a Cartoony world. It just looks dumb. Though the Warbeast eating a guy's head definitely made me snicker. I hope it has more of that kind of thing in it.

I guess when I do my Beta coverage we'll get to the bottom of the matter.

It doesn't matter what Blizz was trying to accomplish with SC2. I would hope they weren't going for the game that SC2 turned out to be. For me, the entire experience was bad. The voices sounded horrible - nothing like the original's voices/sfx. At times (ahem, Overmind sequence) it felt like playing those crappy licensed expansion packs - you know, Retribution or that other one? That's all I'm saying. SC2 is a badly executed expansion pack. Oh well.

Still got the Oracles and Lavarinths and Magloks (and hopefully more) to bring us the good stuff.

IMO, the art team mistook some facts regarding the tech back then the color limits. To my mind, Diablo wasn't cartoony at all in it's time. The limit in color back then due to hardware justified the lack of depth, and to the viewer's mind it translated to "the most realism our tech can achieve, atm".

Therefore, it is only natural that we cringe at the current incarnation of D3's theme with regards to art.

TBH, I'd rather they go for more realism now with D3, than the "paintery" thing.

Hunter_Killers wrote:It's really funny that SC1 has a higher production quality overall than SC2 does considering how long they've been hiding it in development.

Yeah, that's really funny.^^

Lavarinth wrote:StarCraft II is overbeaten to me, personally, I don't think it's terrible, but I do think it could of been much more beautiful in terms of graphics.

But the original StarCraft had exact the same problem. The graphics ingame were at that time, when 3D slowly began to rise, not anywhere near appropriate. But this is maybe a tradition attribute of Blizzard, like their slogan said: Gameplay first... (And not Graphic first!)

It's a good thing sc2's gameplay is totally not a washed out mess aimed at casual players.

Also, if you think sprite-based games are outdated just because they are sprite-based... well, I oughta slap you.

Also, for the record, Bulletstorm had some of the most solid FPS gameplay I've seen in a while. You can have best of both worlds very easily. Hire people who have an idea what they're doing. Same with writing or voice acting